I’ve seen this before. The result is a revolving door of temporary work. Because soon companies will be “you already put 6 months in, we don’t have enough signal work 6 more months” and at the year mark they swap you for a new candidate.

And before you say that this is inefficient consider that despite being terrible for morale and efficiency (proven in un’etica studies) companies still maintain the bottom 10% out or up or out policies.

Companies always love their power on their employee over efficiency.

This paper (from the same research as his book on high end culinary organizations) is worth a read https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0001839214557638 - he talks about "negotiated joining" which is a similar scheme for placements that works well with undefined job roles.

The industry should get down from its egocentric ivory tower and start hiring like other industries. You are not special, tech. Just have a sort of bar exam you have to take every x amount of years. The actual interview should just be an in-person behavioral one, with your future boss. Period. Don't get enough signal from that? Sorry, that's life, taking risks. Imagine trying to open a business without taking risks, and only kickstart it once you are a 100% sure it will work. No other industry is as delusional. Here is a reality pill: what you are asking, a 100% safe investment, is impossible, as any economist will tell you. "Campfire", give me a break, grown up adults with families don't have time for that Silicon Valley wankery, and you have no evidence that the results will be as good and unbiased as you think they'll be...thanks for bringing attention to the subject though, and in passsing also confirming how garbage the Google (and FAANG, in general) hiring process really is.

Just one more thing: the industry should really put a bit more weight on measuring people's potential and the concept of long-term growing and learning on the job. Just saying. You know, like every other industry on this planet.

> Another reason is that on the supply side, nobody wants to sign up to do a bunch of free work just to be rejected. If you just put up work, the candidates incur all the risk, meaning they walk away with nothing if you don’t hire them.

It's true, but prepping for a typical senior+ onsite loop in big tech still requires weeks of grinding leetcode, re-learning the latest system interview questions and the system interview answer framework, refreshing and rehearsing STAR stories, studying the company and its unique quirks that you're expected to know to pass the culture filter, remembering how to do all of this speedrun-style since you only get 40ish minutes per session, etc.

While that knowledge is more reusable across onsites, it's likely even more work than doing real or pretend-work for the company for a couple of days.

> When candidates get to walk away with something of lasting value that they can keep forever

I'm curious why them getting rejected from the position, even with the work sample they can carry away with them, wouldn't be still interpreted as a negative from future employers. "The other co passed on them, am I the fool for thinking they're good?" type of herd mentality which is often unavoidable.

Won't that "work sample guest book" be treated as the list of all companies that rejected you, a net negative for your personal brand you're projecting?

> (Me paraphrasing what Steve was implying) Take-homes are impacted by AI one-shotting them for candidates

I've been pleasantly surprised by how much you can glean from having the candidate upload their conversation log with the coding agent for whatever take-home you give them.

What's with the fox performing phrenology on a sheep in the generated image captioned "The moment we realized it was us"?

Seconded, stop the theatrics and gatekeeping and let's keep a growth mindset while training / retraining those who 'pass the buck' overtime. At least everyone can get skills and talented outliers will find themselves with more structure and collectively we'll produce better outcomes for more engineers at multiple levels of experience.

Everyone is annoyed when Google or whatever has a gruelling high bar to get in, but nobody bats a lid when say Jane Street does it. Both wildly successful.

His idea has some merit but will require the old system to completely crash out before anything new will be considered and I'm not sure if it will crash or just keep limping along. If it really does crash out hopefully we will see multiple new strategies emerge as there are many possible options once the current one is off the table.

Maybe three days is enough for some code bases, but if you have millions of lines of code, agents aren't going to help you that much.

> One day, the recruiters gave us a special round of packets to review. In these special packets, we were able to read the interviewer notes and candidate responses. All personal details were stripped out, and we were told it was a “calibration exercise.” We had to do our regular voting job with these special packets, and see how it went. I think we may have assumed they were from another site, since cross-site calibration was common. Our group did our job, and voted not to hire about 2/3 of the packets. This was about par for the course. But surprise surprise, this time, those were our own packets from when we had all interviewed at Google. The recruiters had tricked us into reviewing our own interview packets, and we had voted not to hire most of our own group. For that brief moment, we all had a glimpse into how utterly broken our process was. The people-team had rubbed our noses in it.

Or maybe the company changed in the 10 years or so since everyone in that room was hired and the employee needed 10 years ago is not the same as the ones needed now?